Mixtape: Al Lover “Distorted Reverberations”

Al Lover was kind enough to send us this awesome mix, and it’s already one of my new favorites. He clearly put a lot of work into this one, so I’ll let him explain what it’s all about:

Picking up where his highly acclaimed ‘Safe as Milk Replica’ left off, San Francisco producer Al Lover presents his latest work ‘Distorted Reverberations (of Reverberating Distortion)’. Continuing his journey into the depths of fuzzed out boom bap chaos, ‘Distorted’ is a collection of some of today’s best garage and psych rock tunes sampled and chopped up into tweaked-out, neck snapping instrumental hip-hop slabs.

From the crunchy deconstruction of Ty Segall’s version of “Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart”, driven by spastic breaks, piercing tambourine and haunting guitar howls, to the phased out twangy tones and grimy claps of Davila 666’s “Yo Seria Otro”, that resembles what a peyote trip into the future might sound like, ‘Distorted’ sifts through to the rhythm and blues roots of current psychedelic rock and mutilates it over classic breaks in a “wall of sound” fashion not unlike classic Bomb Squad or Dust Brothers production, only drenched in liquid acid.

Inspired by the revitalized garage, and psych scene in SF, Al Lover takes his own approach to the effects used by local bands and applies them to his MPC with the aid of various guitar pedals and recording techniques. The layering of different tones and effects used on the samples produces a beefy, aggressive, original sound not heard in instrumental hip-hop today. The Idea being to experiment with new ideas while directly siting influences and source material as a way of sharing the music sampled with those who have yet to hear it, thus hopefully helping to further connect the underground music community.